There have been major changes this year in the FIA World Endurance Championship. Not all of them have been obvious, but each has been significant.
Series organisers the FIA and ACO have introduced a new Balance of Performance (BoP) system, in which they use their own analysis to create a table and then share that information with the manufacturers.
The fact they now don’t tell the manufacturers the criteria they are using has caused some consternation among the teams, and increased pressure on the governing bodies to get it right.
One of the key talking points is the so-called two-stage BoP, which separates the top speed performance balancing from the low-speed measures.
The paddock was collectively worried about the Ferrari 499P, a car that seems to have good top speed. The homologation wind tunnel at Windshear can only measure up to 240km/h, due to the limitations of its rolling road, and Ferrari’s top speed appears to improve disproportionally over 260km/h.
Despite that, the FIA and ACO have not used their two-stage BoP this season, and at Spa stated they were not even considering it for the next race at Le Mans. Instead, they will use last year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans data to formulate a BoP table that will take into consideration the Ferrari’s top speed.
Meanwhile, personnel changes have been taking place up and down the paddock. Engineers have moved from team to team, but the headline switch was Toyota’s experienced technical director, Pascal Vasselon, leaving the Japanese team in January of this year and being replaced by Frenchman, David Floury.
One of the key talking points is the so-called two-stage BoP, which separates the top speed performance balancing from the low-speed measures
Vasselon is a gifted engineer, but also a strong politician. The team is now having to adapt to a new way of working under Floury, who was previously a chief designer for ORECA, but also worked with Toyota as a race engineer under Vasselon, with the clear message that he would one day replace his countryman. Few expected it to be this year, much less the sudden and dramatic exit before the season had even started.
Toyota
The Toyota GR010 Hybrid has taken several hits this year. In 2023 at Le Mans, the car’s minimum weight was increased to the maximum 1040kg allowed by the FIA’s crash testing regulations. The top brass in the company were livid. Fast forward to the first race of 2024, and the minimum weight was upped further, to 1090kg, though fortunately without the need to re-test the chassis for the higher weight.
That put a particular
